You might say it was a bad week for Bill Clinton’s foreign policy. India detonated five nuclear weapons — a direct consequence, according to Indian officials, of Clinton’s appeasement of China and of his administration’s inability to prevent China’s sales of weapons and missile technology to Pakistan. Then there was the administration’s ill-conceived and bungled attempt to strong-arm Israel into making more territorial concessions to Yasser Arafat. That brilliant idea, the brainchild of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and her top Middle East adviser, Martin Indyk, blew up in the administration’s face, forcing Albright to retract the ultimatum to Israel that she had so foolishly issued the week before.
At the same time, in Kosovo, where the next Balkan war seems about to erupt, Albright’s vague and empty threats over the past month have had their predictable effect: Serbia’s top thug, Slobodan Milosevic, last week stepped up his violent repression of the ethnic Albanian majority, driving more and more Albanians to take up arms. In Indonesia, meanwhile, where Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin has been fecklessly trying to maintain “stability” by giving millions of dollars to prop up the Suharto dictatorship, riot police shot and killed six anti-Suharto protesters in what is shaping up to be a national bloodbath. In the face of that mounting crisis, the administration is quite visibly paralyzed. Albright’s call last week for “political reform” comes about four months too late.
And that’s just last week’s headlines. Buried inside the newspapers was a word of the even more ominous collapse of U.S. policy in Iraq. On May 8, the Washington Times quoted senior officials of the U.N. inspections team as declaring, “We’re dead and [the Iraqis] know it.” The weapons inspectors charged that the Clinton administration has given up on finding Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and is in fact in the process of giving up on the U.N. inspections regime. They’re right. Despite the U.N. inspectors’ insistence that “no progress” has been made in uncovering Saddam’s biological and chemical weapons programs, President Clinton publicly announced he was “encouraged.” According to the Wall Street Journal, the administration has already agreed on a strategy of retreat from the Persian Gulf. A travel ban imposed on Iraqi officials last year, but never enforced, has been lifted by the U.N. Security Council. The next step will be the lifting of all sanctions on Saddam’s regime later this year. Meanwhile, President Clinton has ordered a drastic cut in U.S. forces in the Gulf. As one U.N. inspector told the Times, Clinton officials “have lost interest”; the inspections regime “is imploding and everybody knows it.”
That’s a lot of bad news for one week, but merely to list these foreign- policy debacles is to miss the more significant, and the more frightening, reality: Six years into Clinton’s presidency, U.S. global leadership is collapsing. With it may go the peaceful, democratic, and prosperous international order Clinton’s predecessors worked so hard to establish.
So far, the press, the Congress, and even the Clinton administration itself have been treating the various calamities around the world as discrete crises. In fact, they’re all related. Take Kosovo. It’s now clear that the administration’s backing off from effective military action against Saddam Hussein earlier this year encouraged Milosevic to believe that he could clamp down on the Albanian population without fear of U.S. military response. And the administration’s timid “multilateralism” throughout the Iraq crisis, when both Russia and France were allowed to thwart U.S. efforts against Saddam, played out again when Russia and U.S. allies repeatedly balked at imposing harsher sanctions against Serbia at critical moments in the unfolding crisis. Now it seems that France and Russia are prepared to gang up on the United States to argue against effective action just about anywhere — and the Clinton administration will yield.
Or take India’s nuclear tests last week. It may be a coincidence that India’s decision came just a few days after the Clinton administration announced its new “strategic partnership” with China. But the Indians know that “strategic partnership” has meant American winking at China’s assistance to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and missile programs. Just as important, the Indians know that “strategic partnership” turns out to mean in practice the frightening specter of an increasingly aggressive China unchecked by U.S. power. Indeed, on May 3 the Indian defense minister in a television interview cited China’s nuclear weapons stockpiled along India’s borders and said, ” China is potential threat number one.” Without reliable U.S. leadership to provide security in Asia, the Indians have unfortunately — but not surprisingly — chosen to see to their own defense.
And they may have thought they could get away with it at little or no cost. After all, for four years the Clinton administration has been unwilling to sanction China for its sales of weapons and technology to Pakistan and Iran. The Indian government may well have decided that Clinton’s devotion to the interests of American big business would eventually trump his alleged concern about the proliferation of nuclear weapons and medium-range ballistic missiles.
And the administration’s stupid confrontation with Israel last week can be traced back to its defeat in Iraq a couple of months ago. Recall that in the weeks before the administration’s capitulation to Saddam — codified in the February 23 agreement between Kofi Annan and the Iraqi government — Secretary Albright made a tour of the Middle East trying to drum up support for U.S. policy. What she got instead was a tongue-lashing by Arab leaders about Israel’s alleged “intransigence” in the peace process. In truth, most of the Arab states were reluctant to support the Clinton administration in what looked likely to be only a futile pin-prick bombing raid against Iraq. But Albright and other U.S. officials preferred to lay the blame for their failure on Netanyahu. Thus emerged over subsequent weeks the ultimatum strategy, which has now put U.S.-Israeli relations in crisis. But this is what you get from an administration too timid to exert real international leadership: It’s always easier to let down your friends than to fight your enemies.
It’s hard to think of a time when America’s international standing was so low, when Washington’s credibility was in such disrepair, when an American president and his top advisers seemed so adrift in a sea of international troubles. Hard, but not impossible. From where we sit, the present moment looks a lot like the late 1970s. Obviously, there’s no Soviet Union; but the post-Cold War world has its own set of risks, and our weakness is in certain ways as dangerous today as our weakness was in the late 1970s. Bill Clinton’s foreign policy has become the post-Cold War equivalent of Jimmy Carter’s.
It’s also worth noting that Clinton-administration defense spending has continued down; it’s now at the lowest percentage of GDP since Pearl Harbor. Declining military strength has accelerated the erosion of U.S. leadership around the world.
Congress, of course, has acquiesced in this decline. The Republican budgets introduced in both House and Senate this year propose the same level of defense spending as Clinton. And in foreign policy more generally, Republican handwringing over Bosnia and other foreign involvement has diverted the party from the necessary serious critique of U.S. weakness and timidity.
Now is the time for members of Congress of both parties, and all aspiring presidential candidates, to step up to the plate. Where are the new “Scoop” Jacksons and John Towers? And, above all, who will be this era’s Ronald Reagan?
